Content warning: This story contains mentions of gun violence.
While violent crime in Chicago is near its lowest point in at least 40 years, many Chicago residents still live near high levels of gun violence, with more than 140 residents dying due to gun violence in 2026 so far, per the City of Chicago Violence Reduction Dashboard.
“No one should be taking victory laps,” said sociology Prof. Andrew Papachristos, faculty director of the Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research & Science, also known as CORNERS. “We should be thinking about what’s working, what’s not working.”
Gun violence impacts marginalized communities disproportionately — according to a 2024 University of Chicago Crime Lab analysis, Black residents are 22 times more likely to die by gun violence compared to white residents.
According to the Reduction Dashboard, between 2018 and 2020, nearly two-thirds of all homicides and nonfatal shootings in Chicago occurred in 15 community areas, which covered only about one-fourth of the city’s population. Those areas, such as West Garfield Park, tended to be historically underserved for the underlying causes of racism, poverty and lack of social services, per the Reduction Dashboard.
Leslie Helmcamp, the director of Violence Prevention Initiatives at the Patrick M. Magoon Institute for Healthy Communities at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, said these rates stem from disinvestment in communities. She cited policies that increased drug policing and coined the war on drugs in the 1970s, which dramatically increased the rate at which Black and brown Americans were incarcerated. It also began a cycle of dead-end drug arrests, where people are arrested for low-level drug offenses and released a few days later.
“You have scarcity in communities where you have unmet needs,” Helmcamp said. “You have families that are not intact because of the war on drugs, many people spending long sentences in prison who have a lack of access to services when they come out.”
One organization trying to meet the needs of these communities is Chicago Youth Programs. CYP provides after-school opportunities and healthcare access to at-risk youth, said Diamond McNulty, president of CYP’s Board of Directors.
McNulty was around five years old when he started participating in CYP. He called himself an “average youth” living in what was formerly the Cabrini-Green housing project on Chicago’s Near North Side.
He said the mentorship he got from CYP helped connect him to the restaurant industry, develop his interest in cooking and eventually go to culinary school. Now, he focuses on helping Chicago youth connect with mentors, peers and after-school programs across various fields, including the culinary arts, skilled trades and healthcare.
“The biggest thing for kids is to have access, right? To be able to have the resources for them to be educated,” McNulty said. “It’s all about the choices that they make, and we want them to make the right choices.”
‘How relationships matter’ — the role of network science
While CYP hopes to reach kids before violence can occur, CORNERS researches how to intervene in the small networks where Papachristos said violence is concentrated. He noted that most violence in Chicago is related to interpersonal or intergroup arguments or disputes, which can escalate if someone involved has a firearm.
“Violence concentrates, victimization concentrates them on a very small network, less than a percent of any neighborhood’s population, because being a victim is most often related to arguments or disputes,” he said.
CORNERS uses an approach called network science, which examines relationships among and within communities, such as neighborhoods. Those social networks affect how people think, feel and act, Papachristos said.
To illustrate how people’s social networks affect their probability of exposure to gun violence, he compared the spread of violence to the transmission of disease in a public health context. For example, flu prevention differs from bloodborne illness prevention.
“(Network science) understands how relationships matter,” he said. “Are you trying to stop the transmission through needles or through face masks? And so, in gun violence, it matters a lot about who you’re actually hanging out with and what you’re doing with them.”
While people directly injured by gun violence make up a very small fraction of a community’s population, many people are still affected indirectly. Exposure to gun violence — such as witnessing a shooting or knowing a victim — can be traumatic.
One study by researchers at the University of Cambridge, Harvard University and the University of Oxford followed more than 2,400 Chicago residents from childhood to the beginning of middle age. Published in 2023, it found that over half of Black and Hispanic residents in the study witnessed at least one shooting by age 40, compared to a quarter of white residents.
This trauma takes a particular toll on children: Children exposed to violence, crime and abuse are more likely to struggle with mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety and substance misuse, according to a survey analysis released in 2009 by the Department of Justice.
McNulty said CYP responds to this impact by partnering with mental health resource organizations and guiding conversations with youth about instances of gun violence. After a child in the organization lost a parent to gun violence, McNulty described the toll taken on CYP, and the conversations between organization staff and youth that followed.
“That impacted the entire organization,” McNulty said. “We have to make sure all of our youth are supported.”
Community intervention programs
McNulty emphasized community support is key in violence prevention. CYP has older students speaking with younger ones about problems affecting their communities, from screen time to gun violence.
“It’s better for it to come from older students,” McNulty said. “They can relate a bit more.”
He added that children responded better when discussions were led by fellow young people, rather than when the organization had outside mentors lead the conversation.
CORNERS is also taking a community-oriented approach to violence prevention. Papachristos said the center is currently studying community violence intervention, or CVI, programs. He called CVI “a new name for an old idea,” which brings network science to small networks.
One study by CORNERS found that people who completed a full CVI program were more than 73% less likely to be arrested for violent crime in the two years since enrolling.
CVI programs typically rely on credible messengers, community members use their life experience to intervene before violence erupts. Often, credible messengers were formerly incarcerated or otherwise impacted by the justice system. As members of the communities to which they reach out, credible messengers are familiar with their social networks.
“You send them to kind of intervene in a network, to literally stop the transmission of violence,” Papachristos said.
Support for adults affected by violence is still lacking
While a lot of violence intervention programs focus on youth, Papachristos said the average homicide victim in Chicago is in their late 20s. The majority of homicide victims killed in 2025 in Chicago were between ages 20 and 39, according to a report from the University of Chicago Crime Lab.
“These are the victims, and they have kids, and their kids are exposed to gun violence,” Papachristos said.
He noted that adults need different interventions from youth, such as support in education, literacy, employment, healthcare, or housing. Closing literacy gaps and employment gaps is a completely different process from supporting a school-age child through increased attendance and after-school programs, Papachristos added.
But he said it can be difficult to gain support for programs that help adults impacted by gun violence.
“Everybody likes kids,” he said. “Nobody likes 27 year olds.”
Increased access to housing, education and healthcare can benefit individuals and families, Papachristos said. He said those kinds of interventions go beyond an individual program or policy.
Helmcamp further distinguishes between downstream interventions, which can support people after they are affected by violence, and upstream interventions, which address root causes. While both are vital, Helmcamp said upstream work needs even more attention. She and Papachristos both highlighted housing instability as an area where more needs to be done.
“That’s triage, that’s emergency medicine,” Papachristos said about programs responding specifically to gun violence. “We also need primary care, so we need to work on the housing situation, need to work on better access to education and healthcare and medicine and health, right? Those will help the 12 year old more 10 years from now.”
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